ClickFunnels cut deploy cycle times by 14x with RWX

ClickFunnels switched from a brittle enterprise CI platform to RWX, shrinking deploy cycle times from hours to minutes while saving over $60K in infrastructure costs.

“With RWX, deployments that once took multiple hours, even up to an entire day, and required multiple engineers are now 20-minute, one-person workflows. Not only are we saving real money, but our engineers finally have a CI solution they enjoy using.”

#About

ClickFunnels is a B2B marketing platform equipping entrepreneurs and small businesses with everything they need to design, launch, and optimize high‑converting funnels without a large technical team. Since its founding in 2013, it has grown into one of the leading sales funnel platforms and earned the 2024 Best in SaaS Award for Best Company in Sales Funnel Software.

#Challenge

#ClickFunnels' delivery pipeline was burning time, budget, and engineering trust

As ClickFunnels' user base grew, its team faced mounting pressure to deliver frequent releases, expand test coverage, and tighten feedback loops. However, their CI/CD pipeline, architected around sequential job execution on shared infrastructure, resulted in every run incurring a hefty cost for setup and idle compute before any real work began.

Engineers waited through long, serialized runs stretching to multiple hours on average. And without built-in flake detection or targeted retry logic, there was no reliable way to tell whether a failure reflected a real regression or an intermittent test problem. VP of Platform Engineering, Nate Vick, tried to work within these constraints by rerunning jobs and manually investigating failures, but these additional steps further delayed every cycle. The result was a delivery pipeline that consumed too much time, budget, and attention for the value it provided.

Recognizing that the problem couldn't be solved by rerunning jobs or scaling headcount, Nate set out to find a CI/CD platform better aligned with ClickFunnels’ needs. His ideal solution would deliver native flake detection, content-based caching, and fast feedback loops, giving his team the data and tooling to systematically address test instability.

That search ultimately led him to RWX. After seeing firsthand how the CI/CD platform could spin up parallel tasks in seconds, surface flaky tests automatically, and condense deployments from hours to minutes, he had all the conviction needed to solidify the partnership.

“We were dealing with flaky tests, slow feedback, and expensive CI. Some deployments could take many hours and several engineers, which just isn’t acceptable when your business relies on shipping with speed and confidence.”

#Solution

#Unlocking a swift, reliable, and cost-efficient path to production with RWX

With RWX, ClickFunnels effortlessly stabilizes test feedback, slashes CI infrastructure costs, and accelerates the pathway to production.

The partnership started with a turnkey onboarding, during which RWX requested read access to ClickFunnels’ repo, prepared the initial run definition, and handed Nate a single file to commit as the starting point. Nate then worked directly with RWX's engineers in a shared Slack channel to fine-tune configurations, resolve issues as they surfaced, and continuously improve pipeline performance. “Onboarding was a wonderfully simple process,” Nate shares. “After providing read access to our repo, we were live within days with hardly any lift from our team.”

Following integration, RWX impacted ClickFunnels’ delivery pipeline in several concrete ways:

#DAG-based execution and content-based caching

With RWX’s DAG-based execution, each workflow is expressed as a directed acyclic graph of tasks that fan out across right-sized serverless workers. Now, rather than endlessly queuing on shared machines, ClickFunnels effortlessly runs 80+ tasks in parallel.

Additionally, the pipeline derives cache keys from the filesystem contents and automatically reuses prior outputs, so only tasks with changed inputs are rebuilt, cutting both pipeline time and compute usage.

When a branch has already passed on RWX and is up to date with main, Nate often sees deploy pipelines resolve as a chain of cache hits, moving almost immediately from validation to deployment. In those cases, builds that would take 15 minutes finish in under a minute. As Nate puts it, the savings feel "significant enough that it changed how we think about what we're willing to run through CI."

#Built-in test management that tames flakiness

RWX delivered a systematic way for Nate’s team to identify, isolate, and control flaky tests rather than absorb their cost on every run. By ingesting historical test results, the platform flags intermittently failing tests, enabling the team to quarantine them so they no longer block builds, and targets retries at individual failures instead of forcing full job reruns. Suites are also split into balanced parallel groups based on recorded runtimes, so work is evenly distributed across tasks, and no single group becomes a bottleneck.

#A CLI and MCP server that unlocks AI-powered workflows

Nate’s team can now trigger runs and stream logs in real time, iterating on pipeline changes without cycling through a web UI. That tighter feedback loop extends into how Nate's team handles failures: using the embedded MCP server, Nate pulls failed test lists and detailed failure data directly into Claude Code, where an AI agent triages bugs and proposes fixes based on real pipeline runs rather than reconstructed context.

"RWX knows what developers need to be productive in their day-to-day. Every tool they offer is best-in-class, and it shows in the downstream impact on deployment times and cost savings."

#Results

#Accelerated deployments, reduced infrastructure costs, and future-proof CI foundation

With RWX, ClickFunnels transformed a slow, brittle delivery setup into a fast, dependable pathway from code to production. Now, Nate’s team ships in minutes instead of hours, with pipelines that scale to the size and complexity of their codebase rather than fighting it.

Since partnering with RWX, ClickFunnels has seen:

• 14x reduction in deploy cycle times
• $60k+ annual savings on CI infrastructure
• 80+ parallel tasks running on RWX per pipeline

Looking ahead, Nate is eager to expand beyond CI/CD into autonomous, agent-driven deployment, ultimately turning RWX into the execution layer where AI agents can not only triage issues but also propose and ship fixes with minimal human intervention.

“RWX didn’t just make our pipelines faster; it changed how we think about delivery. We can ship whenever we want, trust our tests, and start layering AI on top of a platform that already runs our entire stack.”